Jay Angler wrote:Call me old fashioned, but I really believe that getting kids to memorise the basic math facts makes it far easier for them to learn complicated math processes when they get to higher grades.
I encourage all parents suddenly thrown into homeschooling to think outside the box, as Nicole has demonstrated above. I think that our more active kids may really benefit from learning certain skills by doing them 'bigger' involving more of their body.
I couldn’t agree anymore emphatically with you, Jay. As a seventh grade math teacher, I always begged the six grade teacher, “If you don’t teach them anything else, at least teach them the multiplication facts.” Of course, they’re supposed to learn that in fourth grade but that’s beside the point. If my students know their multiplication facts it’s easy for me to teach them what -8 times 4 is. If they don’t know the multiplication facts they’re trying to figure out what eight groups of four is and it takes so much longer.
I look at math kind of like reading. There’s the phonics group and there’s the sight reading group and they’re at odds with each other all the time. I believe you need both. You need phonics to sound out the very hard words and you need to know some sight reading words. I’ve had some kids in seventh grade, sounding out the word the, because they were taught only phonics reading.
